WASHINGTON STATE'S DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND HEALTH SERVICES EXPECTS CORTICON TO REDUCE IT STAFF REQUIREMENTS BY 80% FOR LEGACY SYSTEM CHANGE EFFORTS
DSHS and Corticon Present Results of Success at Business Rules Management Forum
SAN MATEO, CA., November 29, 2004—Corticon™ Technologies, the leading provider of business rules management software, today announced that Washington State's Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) is using Corticon to model and automate a growing number of the agency's policies and procedures for payments to third-party service providers. Earlier this month, Corticon and DSHS co-presented a case study about the benefits of rules modeling at the 2004 Business Rules Management Forum in Las Vegas, NV.
DSHS is using Corticon Business Rules Management to extend, and ultimately modernize, its legacy payment processing system. Corticon helps DSHS describe the control points within their payment process as visual models of business rules, which are analyzed for compliance and consistency with governing policy. The Corticon solution automatically generates executable Web Services from the models, which will be used both to extend the legacy systems and within new systems. By externalizing the business rules from core application logic, Corticon provides a far more flexible and reliable solution.
"We estimated that our first deployed project, adding federal tax withholding to payment processing, would have taken thirty COBOL programmers one year to complete," said Bonnie Moonchild, SSPS Project Manager, DSHS. "With Corticon, the same project will be completed by five analysts and one programmer in the same time period, representing an 80% reduction in staff requirements."
"Enterprises are more pressed to become adaptable and apply the knowledge captured in rule sets to outflank competition and deal with changing business environments," said Jim Sinur, Vice President and Research Area Director at Gartner. "Business users want to change rules without going through a long-running change process that is, at best, measured in days and, at worst, in weeks and months. We expect response times to move to hours as enterprises move toward 'zero time to market.' This is accomplished by pushing rules 'outboard' and allowing business users control over critical business rules."
Procedural knowledge within many corporate and government organizations is oftentimes trapped in the minds of IT professionals who are long gone or in antiquated computer coding within legacy IT systems. DSHS's system was initially developed in 1980, and over the years, it has been modified, enhanced, reconfigured, and transformed to handle additional responsibilities and changes in legislative mandates. Prior to Corticon, making changes to such a system was difficult and very time consuming.
"Just because you understand how to program doesn't mean you want to work in code - it's a real pain," said Laura Killian, Senior Analyst, DSHS. "Before Corticon, it took us nine months to make simple changes to our technology process, and I never want to go through that again. With the Corticon rules engine, the screen layout is very functional and easy to use. And changing or adding to the rules is as simple as working in Excel."
Corticon is differentiated by its business-friendly rules modeling environment, which speeds time-to-market and time-to-change by 10x relative to traditional business rules engines and coding techniques. Corticon offers the industry's first standalone desktop business rules modeler, enabling business users to create business rule sets using spreadsheet-like models instead of programming code. In addition, Corticon also offers the only technology that mathematically verifies the reliability of business rules as a part of the modeling process, through patent-pending technology known as the Predicate Logic Matrix™. Unlike other business rules solutions, Corticon-modeled rules are guaranteed to deliver their intended result, providing a logically complete and unambiguous decision for every possible outcome. As a result, Corticon enables organizations to streamline operational processes, ensure compliance with corporate policies and regulations, and increase agility and flexibility to adapt business processes as the marketplace changes.
"When DSHS first came to us, they knew they needed a rules engine. What they discovered in working with us is the value of business rules modeling," said Mark Allen, President and CEO of Corticon Technologies. "By modeling business rules, organizations are finding they can reap tremendous benefits, including capturing and retaining business knowledge related to best practices, legacy systems, policies and regulations, as well as improving the quality of that knowledge, by resolving ambiguity, loop holes and redundancies. Additionally, companies are finding that when they model their business rules, they can accelerate the development of new IT solutions and make changes to their existing systems in minutes and hours instead of days and months."
About Corticon Technologies, Inc.
Corticon™ Technologies helps organizations make better, faster decisions by managing the rules that drive their business. Corticon Business Rules Management, which delivers a next generation business rules modeler and business rules engine, ensures the consistent, efficient and reliable execution of a company's strategies and policies. Unlike competitive products that require skilled programmers, Corticon's solution is for use by business analysts who find it as easy to use as a spreadsheet. This results in transformational productivity improvements in key business processes.
Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., with an engineering center in Culver City, Calif., Corticon is a venture-backed, privately held company. For additional information on Corticon and its solutions call +1 650-212-2424 or visit the company's Web site at www.corticon.com.
|
